When the author was young, Sunday afternoons were usually spent indoors with his large, staunchly Presbyterian family. One of his relatives would read aloud from the Bible, or, occasionally, from "The Captives of Abb's Valley," a biography of his great-great-great grandmother, Mary Moore. To his mother and her sisters, the book was almost a second Bible, and they spoke of its characters with fear and respect. The author thought it rather tiresome, except for the illustrations and certain gruesome passages. When he was recently given the family copy, he was disappointed by the engravings, but gave up an attempt to recapture his early attitudes toward the book, and went ahead and reread it. In considerable detail it recounted his ancestor's capture by Indians, the violent deaths of her parents and siblings, her sale for whiskey in Canada, and her missionary work among the savages. The author recalled the family seamstress's analysis of the tale. Alvernia claimed that Mary's mother had bungled the Indian attack, and suggested that perhaps she had not really wanted to save her husband's life. She said that it would intimidate her to have a relative as saintly as Mary Moore and that she felt much more comfortable knowing that she could never be as bad as her own great-grandmother.
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